On being 'in-between': Social and cultural geography in Denmark

Abstract

Department of Geography and International Development Studies,Roskilde University, Roskilde, DenmarkIt is with a touch of ambivalence that I startwriting this ‘country report’ on social and cul-tural geography in Denmark. In the light ofrecent discussions on Anglo-American andEnglish-language hegemony in ‘international’geographic writing spaces (see, e.g., Berg andKearns 1998; Gregson, Simonsen and Vaiou,forthcoming; Minca 2000), I welcome the initia-tive by Social & Cultural Geography as astrategy seeking to address and work againstthis hegemony. On the other hand, however,this strategy carries the danger of casting thewriter as an unproblematized translator who—by way of a dual and ambiguous positionbetween discourses—mediates the otherwiseunknown and inaccessible ‘other’ to the power-ful inhabitants of the ‘centre’ (Gregson, Simon-sen and Vaiou, forthcoming). Like any other‘map’ of an intellectual landscape, a ‘countryreport’ is a social construction, a narrativeconstrued by a writer who is ambiguously posi-tioned in the very field she is trying to describe.This should not be seen as a confession, nor asawaytodisclaimtheresponsibilityforthestoryto come, but rather as a problematization of thevery notion of ‘country reports’ suggesting that,like all other practices of representation, theyare necessarily situated, embodied and partial.While the global circulation of informationand ideas—in spite of all its inequalities anddeformations—renders problematic any essen-tializing claims and underlines the hybridity ofall (national) knowledge production, cultural/academic traditions and institutional settingsstill also situates it in time and space andfacilitate some perspectives and ways of know-ing at the expense of others. The ‘map’ of socialandculturalgeographyinDenmarkwhichIwilltry to draw in the following starts from a seriesof ‘in-betweens’. The first of these moves be-tween the social and the cultural. The ‘culturalturn’ within Danish geography has not takenthe form of an opposition between social theoryandculturalstudies(astheAnglo-Americanoneis represented for instance in Gregory 1994) orbetweenpoliticsofredistributionandpoliticsofrecognition. Cultural issues such as differenceand identity have been theorized and exploredthrough the lens of (critical) social theory andthe social and the cultural have never reallydeparted. Related to that, my second ‘in-between’ moves between social constructionismand critical realism. It would be fair to say thatthe epistemological move taken by many of theinvolved writers can be characterized as anattempt to make their way between social con-structionism and critique of essentialism, on theone hand, and some kind of ontological realism